UPDATE: Hearthstone ends beta, is officially released

12 March 2014

By Miklós Szecsei

Blizzard has announced that Hearthstone has officially left beta and has been released, with version 1.0 of the game being made available last night. The game began a six month closed beta in June last year, which turned into an open beta in January 2014. If you were playing the beta and haven’t logged in since the game officially launched, then expect a data wipe.

Alongside the release of the game, Blizzard has added a number of new features and cosmetic perks. For a start, you can now earn golden, animated hero portraits after winning 500 ranked matches with any particular hero. Additionally, different card backings are awarded to those players who partake in the various ranked seasons – the first of which is yet to kick-off so keep an eye on Battle.net for further details as to when you can start earning these different backings.

Finally, a number of bugs have been mopped up for the final release, and two Legendary cards, Tinkmaster Overspark and Nat Pagle, have been tweaked a little bit. There’s also an option to resume a game if you lose your connection to Battle.net, but you’ll only have a window of 60 seconds to re-establish a secure connection before you’re booted from the match. For a full list of adjustments and additions, head over to this page here.

The game is available for PC and Mac. Blizzard is still working on the iPad version which they say is “coming soon”. Android and iPhone versions are in the works as well.

UPDATE: there is no data wipe now that the game is out of beta. Everything will be just as you left it.